The recent tragic and completely avoidable deaths of 13 women and the critical condition of many more following laparoscopic sterilisation in Bilaspur, Chhattisgarh, signals that nothing has really changed in India's family planning programme over the past several decades. The manner in which the surgeries were performed, in complete violation of all standard operating procedures and ethical norms, amounts to grave violation of the very basic health rights of the affected women...

After 22 years of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics (IJME) and 10 years of National Bioethics Conferences(NBCs), it is time for some reflection on our achievements and the challenges ahead.We launched the NBC in 2005 as an independent platform for bioethics, for the participation of individuals, organisations and institutions concerned with this subject in India. We expected about 100 participants and were delighted when over 300 participants from more than 100 institutions turned up.

In the course of our professional experience, we have seen that many medical students plagiarise. We hypothesised that they do so out of ignorance and that they require formal education on the subject. With this objective in mind, we conducted a teaching session on issues related to plagiarism. As a part of this, we administered a quiz to assess their baseline knowledge on plagiarism and a questionnaire to determine their attitudes towards it. We followed this up with an interactive teaching session, in which we discussed various aspects of plagiarism. We subjected the data obtained from the quiz and questionnaire to bivariate and multivariate analysis. A total of 423 medical students participated in the study. Their average score for the quiz was 4.96±1.67 (out of 10). Age, gender and years in medical school were not significantly associated with knowledge regarding plagiarism...